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Why is everything so scalable?

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Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#161

Post by throwaway894345 »

wongarsu wrote: post #126
hrimfaxi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your regulatory environment, it can be cost-effective to not have to maintain your own data center with 24/7 security response, environmental monitoring, fire suppression systems, etc. (of course, the majority of businesses are probably not interested in things like SOC 2)

This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center…

I'm a lot less concerned about CPU and ram and a lot more concerned about replicated object storage (across data centers). High end GPUs are also pretty important.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#162

Post by bccdee »

gf000 wrote: post #62
aeyes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The architecture you describe is ok because in the end it is a fairly simple website. Little user interaction, limited amount of content (at most a few million records), few content changes per day. The most complex part is probably to have some kind of search engine but even with 10 million videos an ElasticSearch index is probably no larger than 1GB. The only problem is that there is a lot of video data.

As opposed to what problem? Like I can honestly have trouble listing too many business problems/areas that would fail to scale with their expected user count, given reasonable hardware and technical competence. Like YouTube and Facebook are absolute outliers. Famously, stackoverflow used to run on a single beefy machine (and the reason they changed their architecture was not due to scaling issues), and "your" startup…

Scaling to a lot of reads is relatively easy, but you get into weird architectural territory once you hit a certain volume of writes. Anything involving monitoring or real-time event analysis can get hairy. That's when stuff like kafka becomes really valuable.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#163

Post by mannyv »

Actually, scalability is cheap. Our AWS bill until recently was around $160-$200 a month. To get the level of HA and performance would require at least 20 boxes in two data centers.

Dev/test/prod with an HA db and a backend that never dies. I’ve built those on bare iron and they’re expensive.

If you’re going for saas and customers that don’t care about your infrastructure then a hetzner box is fine.

But really, creating resilient infrastructure is super cheap now.

Agree with “make what your customers want,” but many customers actually want a service that doesn’t barf.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#164

Post by coder543 »

wongarsu wrote: post #152
hrimfaxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??

Hetzner [1]. Bandwidth is 1 GBit/s. You can also get 10 GBit/s, that's hidden away a bit instead of being mentioned on the order page [2] 1: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex 2: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...

I have wished for years that Hetzner would offer their bare metal servers in the U.S., and not just Hetzner Cloud.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#165

Post by iknowstuff »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #151
wongarsu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. Preferably rent two servers, because reliablity. Once you outgrow renting servers you start renting rack space in a certified data center…

> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book. What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??

https://us.ovhcloud.com/bare-metal/prices/?display=list

also pretty sure 24 cores is like 48 cloud “cores” which are usually just hyper threads right?

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#167

Post by walkabout »

potatolicious wrote: post #88
nicoburns wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the work is deterministic, but it often (unintentionally) makes the systems being developed non-deterministic!

Ah yes. I once worked at a startup that insisted on Mongo despite not having anywhere near the data volume for it to make any sense at all. Like, we're talking 5 orders of magnitude off of what one would reasonably expect to need a Mongo deployment. I was but a baby engineer then, and the leads would not countenance anything as pedestrian as MySQL/Postgres. Anyway, fast forward a bit and we were tasked with building…

I watched a company you've probably heard of burn stupid amounts of money because one guy there was trying to build a personal brand as a Graph Database Expert, and another had fallen hard for Neo4j's marketing. Stability issues, stupid bugs, weak featureset, mediocre performance for most of the stuff they wanted to do (Neo4j, at least at this time, was tuned to perform some graph-related operations very fast, but it was extremely easy to find other graph-related operations that it's terrible at, and they're weren't exactly obscure things) all stretching out project development times to like 2x what they needed to be, with absolutely zero benefits for it. So fucking dumb.

Meanwhile all they needed was... frankly, probably SQLite, for their particular use case, having each client of theirs based around a single portable file actually would have been a big win for them. Their data for each client were tiny, like put-it-all-in-memory-on-an-RPi2 tiny. But no, "it's graphs so we need a graph database! Everything's graphs when you think about it, really! (So says Neo4j's marketing material, anyway)"

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#168

Post by Arch-TK »

BirAdam wrote: post #29

Just to be honest for a bit here... we also should be asking what kind of scale? Quite a while ago, before containers were a thing at all, I did systems for some very large porn companies. They were doing streaming video at scale before most, and the only other people working on video at that scale were Youtube. The general setup for the largest players in that space was haproxy in front of nginx in front of several…

I've seen an application, a 95% CRUD application, which had about 100-1000 users across the UK, users who would only be using it from 9am-5:30pm, and at that - barely interacting with it. This was backed by literally the most sophisticated and complex architecture I have ever seen in my entire life.

There were 3 instances of cognito. RDS, DynamoDB and S3. The entire architecture diagram would only be legible on an A2 (heck, maybe even A1) page. And that was the high level diagram. The central A4 part of that diagram was a bunch of micro-services for handling different portions of this CRUD application.

This company could afford a system architect as well as a team of developers to work on this full time.

I was genuinely baffled, but this company was in an extremely lucrative industry, so I guess in this case it's fine to just take some of your profits and burn them.

Re: Why is everything so scalable?

#170

Post by o11c »

jstimpfle wrote: post #158
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #3

I've seen startups killed because of one or two "influential" programmers deciding they need to start architecturing the project for 1000TPS and 10K daily users, as "that's the proper way to build scalable software", while the project itself hasn't even found product-market fit yet and barely has users. Inevitably, the project needs to make a drastic change which now is so painful to do because it no longer fits the…

Something that does not scale to 10k users is likely so badly architected, it would be faster to iterate on it if it was more scalable hence better architected and more maintainable.

For reference, in 1999 10K was still considered a (doable) challenge ... but they were talking "simultaneous" not "per day".

The modern equivalent challenge is 10 million simultaneous users per machine.

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